PREFACE
1860. This second MS. has been followed in the present text.
It may be well to point out that at the time he wrote, and for long years to come, Swinburne seems to have had no personal knowledge of Mazzini. But he followed with ardent sympathy the propaganda of the friends of Young Italy in London, at the head of whose executive council stood the inspiring name of Walter Savage Landor.
The original MSS. contain no indication of date, and the generally rhetorical character of the poetry makes it at first sight impossible to obtain any such term, But on a close examination, one point after another becomes luminous, and we can at length, with almost perfect confidence, date the composition of this ode within a few months. The first salient observation which the reader makes is concerned with Strophe XVII, in which we learn that Poerio was still a prisoner when it was written. But Baron Carlo Poerio—whose case had been, in 1851, so eloquently brought before the English public by Gladstone, in his letters to Lord Aberdeen—was released from his prison on the "foul wild rocks" of the island of Nisida in December 1858. This fact was widely known in England, and Swinburne would certainly have learned it. Moreover, had the ode been written subsequent to January 1858, it could not but
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